The things we talk about when we aren’t talking about real estate

At Hughes Marino, I am surrounded by brilliant real estate minds. Which is, perhaps, why, when I was asked to step forward in a coaching and leadership development role for our Hughes Marino professionals, I leaned into the other stuff. Mindset. Leadership. Hard things. Let’s talk about all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, or between the ears. Getting the soft skills right may be the best way to get through all those hard things. So here are five ideas that I talk about (a lot) in my coaching role with our team.

1. Leadership.

It’s what we do better when we are at our best.

By definition, a broker is a middleman, an agent between two parties, a go-between. Brokers often act as a facilitator, arranging property tours, drafting proposals and counterproposals and summarizing all of this in financial models to be presented to the client. All of this work is done to give the client the information they need in order to make an informed decision. Like when the broker presents an executive summary to the client and says, “so, what do you want to do?” After all, it is the client’s decision to make, right?

Well, yes, and, when we are at our best, I believe the question sounds something like “so, what do you want to do? And here’s what I think we could do, and here’s why.” That’s right, we have a plan, which we share and which we explain.

It isn’t enough to simply gather data. Our job is to lead the project from beginning to end, and to clearly understand the client and the project objectives so that we can navigate a path all the way to the finish line and a winning outcome. It is still, of course, our client’s decision to make, and the better job we do leading the project, the easier that decision becomes for our client.

2. Hard Things.

My colleague, David Marino says it this way—“Those aren’t bumps in the road, that is the road.” Love that. Exactly. Or in the words of Ryan Holiday’s book title—“The Obstacle is the Way.”

In other words, nobody gets through this life without struggling through hard things. So here’s an idea, let’s practice doing hard things and build that muscle since we’re going to need it along this journey.

At Hughes Marino we collect quotes that resonate with our team, we call them HM-isms, and one recent addition was the quote “Run the hill.” It comes from Jim Harbaugh’s first football head coaching role at the University of San Diego in 2004. The practice field was at the base of a long hill, and at the end of every long, hard, hot practice, when the team was waiting for carts to give them a ride back to the locker room Jim instead would choose to run up the hill. Love that.

It isn’t masochism, it’s brilliant—leaning into hard things harder will make you stronger over time. Or to borrow a line from an article I wrote about our three-legged rescue dog Bandy, “when things are hard, go harder, and it might just get easier.”

3. Competition is a Privilege.

I think a lot about game day. I have an image in mind of Jerry Rice lacing up his cleats and standing tall to display his impeccable 49ers game day uniform. That’s what I’m talking about. I also think a lot about all the work we do to be ready on game day. Because we want to win, when winning isn’t guaranteed. So we train, and we practice. The practice field is where we do the hard work and build the skills that we are going to need. Game day is no time to be figuring things out. Game day is a time to just let it all out, to just do it.

I once heard a talk by Canadian Olympic downhill skier Cary Mullen in which he shared a story about 10 Olympic gold medalists who were interviewed, with nine of them describing their gold medal winning experience as “pure joy.” Love that, and it certainly points to an experience of Thich Nhat Hanh’s powerful and elusive “flow.”

Well of course folks love to celebrate victories. And here’s the thing. We may win glorious victory, or we may suffer inglorious defeat, but the outcome isn’t entirely up to us. There is always competition, after all. And just being there, in the arena, on game day? That is a privilege worthy of celebration every time.

Oh, by the way, every day is game day.

4. Failure.

Did I mention that winning isn’t guaranteed? That’s right, some days we emerge from the battlefield with the trophy hoisted high. Other times we are left bloodied on that battlefield suffering the pangs of ignominy. Which is why it is such a good idea to celebrate the mere fact that we are invited into the arena to compete. It’s also why it is a good idea to revisit our concept of failure.

No other word quite captures such a level of abject misery and loss like the word failure. Failing, the opposite of winning, must be avoided at all costs.

Or maybe not.

We build muscle by taking it to the point of failure, causing little tears in the muscle fiber, after which the muscle regrows stronger. In this way, failure is essential to growth. What’s more, only through failure do we learn our true limits, because until you fail, you cannot possibly know how much more you had in you. And if it is true that in each instance we grow stronger following failure, then failure is actually an important waypoint on our growth roadmap. Which helps me feel better about Econ 105, Probability & Statistics.

5. Curiosity & Humility are Essential.

This business of corporate real estate, it turns out, isn’t really about buildings. It’s about people. People who run companies and people who make decisions and people who hire, train and grow their teams. As good as we may be when it comes to real estate, we need to be better when it comes to people.

Two essential tools when it comes to being better at people are curiosity and humility.

Curiosity because this is how we grow, when we are interested and we do the work to learn more and to figure things out.

We like to say, “if you are as good as you are going to get, you can’t work here,” (thanks Joe Calloway) and “we grow as a company when we grow as individuals.” So stay curious.

And let’s have the humility to remember that we may need to ask for help, that we could always be wrong, and that we have no idea what other people have been through.

If we stay curious and humble, just about everything else will take care of itself.

So there it is. Mindset. Leadership. Hard things. By leaning into this other stuff, teams have the ability to sharpen the skills they need to endure and overcome, to crush it on game day in a healthy way, and to grow year in and year out as individuals. Onward I say!